Has Brown failed his own character test?

Weeks before members of U.S. Sen. Scott Brown's staff were caught on camera taunting supporters of his opponent, Elizabeth Warren, by imitating “tomahawk chops” and “war whoops chants,” Bob Bolduc, a disabled veteran experienced it.

Mr. Bolduc, who has Native American heritage, said that while holding signs for Ms. Warren in Auburn and Worcester, he would occasionally be passed by motorist who would throw war whoops and other stereotypical Native American utterances at him.

“Here I am a person with Native American heritage, and these people were treating me like a TV character, shouting out 'what tribe are you from?' ” he said.

“I called the Brown headquarters and left them a message. Maybe I am being too sensitive, but I was offended by it.”

But Mr. Bolduc is not the only one being sensitive to the current state of the race between Mr. Brown and Ms. Warren.

Bill John Baker, Cherokee Nation chief, responded harshly to the video-recorded antics of some of Sen. Brown's staff members.

“It is those types of actions that perpetuate negative stereotypes and continue to minimize and degrade all native peoples,” he said, in calling for an apology from Mr. Brown.

Ms. Warren, a Harvard law professor, has said that when she was a child in Oklahoma, her mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles had often talked about her family having Native American heritage.

Documents have shown that Ms. Warren has listing herself as a Native American in federal forms filed by Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked. In each case, however, she said her heritage played no part in getting those jobs or her advancement.

Mr. Brown is quite sure, however, that Ms. Warren is lying about having Native American heritage, and about not using it to advance her career.

“Professor Warren claimed that she was a Native American, a person of color and as you can see, she's not,” he said last week during the opening minutes of the first of four scheduled debates between the two candidates.

“She checked the box claiming she was a Native American. Clearly she is not.”

And while Mr. Brown characterized his staff stereotyping of Native Americans as “unacceptable” and warned them about continuing that “type of conduct,” he continues to insist that Ms. Warren's Native American claim reflects a character flaw on her part.

“When you are a U.S. senator, you have to pass a test and that's one of character and honesty and truthfulness. I believe, and others believe, she's failed that test,” Mr. Brown said.

Perhaps Mr. Brown has the ability to determine a person's heritage by eyeballing them, but even so, he doesn't' seem to have the moral ground on which to call her out.

He is the candidate who voted for the Massachusetts Health Care law, but who won his Senate seat on the promise that he would vote to kill the Affordable Care Act, which is modeled on the Massachusetts law.

He is the senator who voted for legislation to rein in the excesses and out-of-control behavior of Wall Street, but who has subsequently worked to weaken key provisions of that legislation, particularly provisions that would prevent banks from making high risk investments like those that had contributed to their downfall in the first place.

One could argue that these moves by Mr. Brown suggest he has failed his own test of “character and honesty and truthfulness.”

One could argue that Mr. Brown's attacks against Ms. Warren's undocumented Cherokee heritage is less about him being a champion for honor among politicians, and more about him being a dabbler in the divisive undercurrents of race and dependency in this country.

The latter always seems to be a fall-back strategy when a candidate is not making any headway in talking about the real issues affecting people's lives.

It is an approach quite similar to Mitt Romney accusing President Barack Obama of taking the work requirement out of the welfare law.

Mr. Romney knows that his charge is inaccurate, but sticks by it anyway, because he knows there are some voters who automatically link welfare dependency to the “kind of people” who are voting for Mr. Obama.

By questioning Ms. Warren's heritage, and suggesting she might have used it to advance her career, Mr. Brown is implicitly raising affirmative action as a campaign issue.

It would be more informative if he would tell us where he stands on the issue, but when I inquired yesterday, his spokesman, Felix Brown, didn't know and offered to get back to me.

He didn't, but I know the senator knows perfectly well where the voters he's trying to reach with the Warren attacks stand on the issue.

UPDATE: In an email that was missed prior to publication, the Brown campaign issued the following statement:

"Scott Brown supports equal opportunity and efforts to reach out to historically disadvantaged communities to ensure a diverse and qualified pool of candidates as part of a merit-based hiring system, but does not support race-based quotas."